Abstract It has been a long standing question how to extend, in the finite-dimensional setting, the canonical Poisson bracket formulation from classical mechanics to classical field theories, in a completely general, intrinsic, and canonical way. In this paper, we provide an answer to this question by presenting a new completely canonical bracket formulation of Hamiltonian Classical Field Theories of first order on an arbitrary configuration bundle. It is obtained via the construction of the appropriate field-theoretic analogues of the Hamiltonian vector field and of the space of observables, via the introduction of a suitable canonical Lie algebra structure on the space of currents (the observables in field theories). This Lie algebra structure is shown to have a representation on the affine space of Hamiltonian sections, which yields an affine analogue to the Jacobi identity for our bracket. The construction is analogous to the canonical Poisson formulation of Hamiltonian systems although the nature of our formulation is linear-affine and not bilinear as the standard Poisson bracket. This is consistent with the fact that the space of currents and Hamiltonian sections are respectively, linear and affine. Our setting is illustrated with some examples including Continuum Mechanics and Yang–Mills theory.